# Granite Embedding Multilingual R2 Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13521 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13521/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DenseOn with the LateOn: Fully Open Dense and Late-Interaction Models for Multilingual, Long-Context, and Code Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27178/) (2026)
- [MTEB-BR: A Text Embedding Benchmark for Brazilian Portuguese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04581/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce the multilingual Granite Embedding R2 models, a family of encoder-based embedding models for enterprise-scale dense retrieval across 200+ languages. Extending our English-focused R2 release, these models add enhanced support for 52 languages and programming code, a 32,768-token context window (a 64x expansion over R1), and state-of-the-art overall performance across multilingual and cross-lingual text search, code retrieval, long-document search, and reasoning retrieval datasets. The release consists of two bi-encoder models based on the ModernBERT architecture with an expanded multilingual vocabulary: a 311M-parameter full-size, and a 97M-parameter compact model built via model pruning and vocabulary selection that achieves the highest retrieval score of any open multilingual embedding model under 100M parameters. The full-size also supports Matryoshka Representation Learning for flexible embedding dimensionality. Both models are trained on enterprise-appropriate data with governance oversight, and released under the Apache 2.0 license at https://huggingface.co/collections/ibm-granite, designed to support responsible use and enable unrestricted research and enterprise adoption.